Can Jesus' Deity Be Proven Without the New Testament?

Today's episode of A New Beginning is brought to you by Harvest Partners, helping people everywhere know God.

Learn more at harvest.org. And while you're there, browse our library of free ebooks designed to help you grow in your faith. Can a man named Jesus ever even walk this earth? Just for sake of argument, let's just toss out the biblical manuscript. Okay. Let's just take it out.

Is there a way to make the case for Jesus, even if every single Bible in the history of Bibles had all been destroyed? Well, it turns out there is. Here's how we do it. You know, Pastor Greg, I'm a sucker for crime shows, you know, especially where they solve real-life crime stories, especially cold cases. Yes. And we happen to have a real-life retired cold case detective with us today.

And as much as I'd like to sit here and hear some stories of cases he's worked on, he's here to talk about a more important case. Isn't that right? Yeah, that's right. It's a brand-new book from my friend Jay Warner Wallace. And the J stands for Jim, right? It does.

Yes, it does. Jay Warner Wallace, and his new book is called Person of Interest, subtitled Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible. You know, I think this book is really unique, Jim, because you are basically looking at the impact of Jesus on culture in general. There are actually people walking around that will say, Jesus Christ never existed.

This is all a man-made myth. Of course, that's such a ridiculous statement, but what would you say to someone that would say, well, all we have is the biblical account, you can't trust that, so why should we even believe that a man named Jesus ever even walked this earth? Okay, so I'm with you just for a point of argument, like we're in trial. Yeah. Just for sake of argument, let's just toss out the biblical manuscript. Okay.

If you don't trust that he ever existed, you can't trust what the Bible says about Jesus. Okay, fine. Let's just take it out. Yeah.

Is there a way to make the case for Jesus, even if every single Bible in the history of Bibles had all been destroyed? Hmm. Well, it turns out there is. It's kind of like when you make a case in a cold case where you've got, say, a husband who kills his wife, and then he gets rid of her body, and we take a missing person's report. He says, oh, she ran off.

And so then years later, we decided, hmm, this doesn't seem, she never came back, but something is up. Let's open it as a homicide. So now we're working as a homicide. Okay. But we've got no crime scene. Right. He moved.

He cleaned the place up. We got no physical evidence at all. How do we make that kind of a case to a jury?

Well, here's how we do it. I always tell the jury, on the day of the murder, a bomb went off. Something explosive happened, but there was a long fuse that burned up to that explosion.

And there was all kinds of shrapnel afterwards. We're going to make this case to you from simply the fuse and the fallout. All the stuff that led up to this day and all the stuff that followed. If all you did was look at the history of humanity, everything that leads up to the appearance of this explosive moment that breaks the BC into AD or if you want, you know, before the common era, into the common era, whatever you want to term it. Something explosive happens right there that changes history. We'll just examine the fuse.

Let's examine the fallout. And here's what you're going to discover is that yes, there's only one cause for that turn in history. And his name was Jesus of Nazareth. And you can reconstruct the story of Jesus without any reference to any biblical manuscript, just from the fallout of history in the arts, in music, in literature, in science, in education.

As a matter of fact, let me give you an example of this. If all you did was go and visit the top 15 universities in the world today, here's what you discover. They are all founded by Christians. The top 15, all founded by Christians. Now, they may not be Christian anymore, but they were founded by Christians. And hospitals and relief organizations and all the songs.

Well, guess what? If you just took a look at the buildings, you know, no Bibles now, just the buildings, the buildings of these campuses of those top 15 schools, you're going to discover they're covered in verses. They're covered in artwork of Jesus. You could reconstruct the story of Jesus just from the buildings of the top 15 universities in the world. So unless you're willing to destroy all the top 15 universities, you're going to be stuck with the story of Jesus, even if you didn't have a New Testament. How about a nation called the United States of America?

What is the role of Jesus Christ in the Bible itself in the establishing of our country? Oh, again, here's what's great. Even people who would say, I'm not a religious person, I'm not a pastor, let's say. How about this? Do you realize there's always this fraction between science and faith, right?

Like you can't do both. Well, really? Go back and look at the thing called the scientific revolution. And all of the fathers of all the scientific disciplines, here's what you're going to discover. The vast majority were Christians who also wrote about Jesus and their private writings. And all you had was the private writings of the top scientists in the history of science.

You could reconstruct the story of Jesus. Unless you want to get rid of all those people too from history, you're still stuck with the story of Jesus. Well, Jim, you point out that there's a relationship between what's true and what matters.

In fact, let me quote from your book. You say, few of us order our lives around and make decisions based on our belief in Bigfoot. If we don't believe something is true, then it doesn't matter. And as we share our faith, it's important to remember that an unbeliever may not think Christianity matters because they don't believe it's true.

We need to start at that point, don't we? Yeah, there's no doubt about that. You know, it's been said that one of the biggest challenges to theism, the belief in God, is atheism, right? The belief that there is no God.

But I think it's actually a bigger challenge. And that's what people have started to call apotheism. In other words, that there isn't a sense of urgency about this. Why would I care about this? If it isn't true, why would I even give my life to this? This is why we really wanted to focus on, you know, does Jesus matter? Well, it turns out he matters in all the areas that really matter to me as an atheist. Look, as a non-believer, I only became a believer when I was about 35.

Walked into a church and no interest. Didn't think it was even worth debunking. I've got a good friend, Lee Strobel, with a case for Christ and Lee and Leslie.

Leslie became a Christian first. He was out to prove her wrong. No, I wasn't out to prove it. Why would I investigate the Easter Bunny? Nobody does that, okay?

This is just so patently false, it's not even worth my time. But it turns out that as I examine the things in my own life that matter the most, which would have been education and science and the arts. I've got a background in the arts.

I was an architect before I became a police officer. These are the things that matter to me, even in terms of a spirituality that's non-Christian. Well, it turns out that all of those areas, Jesus matters in those areas. It's Christ followers who shaped art the way we know it today, that shaped music the way we know it today, that shaped education and science. As a matter of fact, no one's had a bigger impact on non-Christian religions than Jesus of Nazareth.

So all those things that matter most to us as a culture, it turns out, we owe a debt of gratitude to Jesus of Nazareth. I think when people realize that, at least they might initiate this effort to decide, who is he? Let's just investigate who this guy is, because it turns out he changed the world. So Jay Warner Wallace, Jim, who's sitting next to me right now, is a Dateline featured homicide detective. So he's approaching this from a different perspective. He's worked on actual cold cases. He knows what he's talking about.

He's presented the evidence to juries and seen people convicted for their crimes. So he's approaching this from a different angle. But one thing you said to me, Jim, I found interesting, is this almost is like a kid's book for an adult. And as I looked through it, you mentioned you have a background in design, as do I. And you've illustrated it pretty much looks like almost every page or at least every other page, maybe every page, has an illustration of some kind, which makes this very digestible. It's like, wow, I can wrap my mind around this. You've really broken this down in a way that just an ordinary person could understand it.

Well, it is like a kid's, it's like a graphic novel in a sense, right? The idea is, I think we're in a generation of people, myself included, we have become so conditioned to seeing it. And you even use that expression, you know, I see what you mean.

And jurors will do this, right? Well, yeah, I got it. Once I saw it, once you found a way of showing me, this is why it's so hard to argue against videos.

Videos show us what happened. And so I wanted to be able to illustrate it in a way that people could see. There's over 400 illustrations.

And so we spent probably about three months just illustrating the book. But the idea here is to help jurors, whoever reads the book, to see what we're talking about. You know, Pastor Greg, when we hear objections to the faith, how do we know if the person's really stuck on a particular fact or idea and they're in search of an explanation, or if they really don't want to even talk about religion and they're in search of an exit from the conversation?

That's right. Well, you know, that's a hard question to answer because sometimes people will hide behind so-called intellectual arguments, but they really want you to talk to them. I'll use myself as an illustration. When I was a kid, I used to hang around by the pier in Newport Beach. I was going the wrong direction in life. I was on drugs.

I was empty. And I saw these Christians walking around handing out little booklets. And I really wanted one of them to engage me, but I had this tough guy facade that they apparently went for. And they would walk by me and just look at me for a moment, just give me this little booklet and walk off. No one would talk to me.

I was literally saying, would someone please talk to me? So I never threw any of these things away. I went home and I had a drawer that was sort of like my God drawer, if you will. Every piece of religious literature I was given went in this drawer. So I had gospel tracks, information from the Watchtower Society, things that Mormons wrote, Hare Krishna writings, you name it, it was in there. And every now and then I would pull this little drawer out, dump it on my bed, and I would try to make sense of it. And really, I wanted answers, but I needed someone to engage me and tell me.

Well, listen, I've got a resource for you that's going to help you tell people more about your faith and engage them in a way that will answer those intellectual questions, but also point them to Jesus Christ. It's called Person of Interest, written by J. Warner Wallace. Now, here's what's unique about Jim is he's an apologist, someone who defends the faith, but he used to be a cold case detective. How long were you a detective, Jim? About 25 years.

25 years. And you still think like a cop, don't you? Sadly.

My wife will tell you that's the sad truth, yes. You know, my daughters would always say, hey, it's impossible to talk to you because I've only been interrogated. Well, tell me how a cop thinks. I would think a police officer is generally analytical, not maybe given to mere emotions.

They're looking at things carefully. How do you process? Let's take a movie, for instance. Your wife and you are in a movie. Do you process it differently or do you?

Oh, yeah. So this is the sad truth about most of us who do this for long enough. If I assume that you are lying to me from the get-go, there's a good chance I'm going to get to the truth eventually. Can you tell when someone's lying? I just assume everyone's lying.

Here's why. Because the reality of it is if I assume people are telling me the truth, I'm going to be fooled. No one's ever going to go to jail. But if on the other hand, I assume everyone's a liar until I can demonstrate otherwise, right? Well, that now I've got a chance to actually dig through and I might find that somebody actually is lying. So the assumption has to be, sadly, this is the challenge for officers, especially if you're Christ followers.

Because we're really called to do something different than this, to have a certain amount of empathy, not to assume everyone is guilty of something. But from an investigative perspective, that was the approach I took to Jesus. Okay, I'm 35, I walk in that church for the first time. The pastor said that Jesus was the smartest person who ever lived. That was the only interest I had in Jesus of Nazareth.

My assumption was upfront. He doesn't exist. He never existed. It's all mythology. But even if it's mythology, I was willing to listen to it if it was smart mythology. But as I investigated the Gospels, I realized this isn't mythology.

This actually occurred. If the resurrection occurred, that's a game changer, right? I mean, I foolishly will believe somebody who rises from the grave, okay? I'm typically going to listen to that guy. And I had to listen to what Jesus and the New Testament authors said about me as well as what they were saying about Jesus.

And so I realized that, yeah, I'm basically the guy they're describing who needs a savior. You know, the folks that service in law enforcement have come under such attack of late, and it's so hard to be a cop. And there's bad cops, just like there's bad preachers and bad dentists and bad doctors and bad everything. But by and large, these are wonderful people that serve us, that put their lives on the line every single day. And I just wanted to say that to those who are in law enforcement, who are listeners to us, that we appreciate what you do. This isn't about your book, but just say a word to people serving us in law enforcement. And maybe say a word to us who are going to encounter these folks, maybe because you went over the speed limit, and how to treat them and think about.

Well, okay, so one of the things that there's so many dimensions to this, Greg, it's almost hard to start, but I'll say this one thing. There's two competing things that we deal with on every shift. The first is the call that we signed up for just to be to act sacrificially to serve our community. In other words, I'm willing to give that lay my life down to protect the community. I'm called to do that.

I swore to do that. At the same time, there's this desire to get home at the end of the shift. Well, these things are absolutely contrary to each other, right? I mean, if I'm going to want to get home at the end of the shift, I should run from danger, right? But if I want to do my calling, I should run toward danger.

So every shift is us trying to figure out how can we accomplish both... Is it possible to accomplish both of these things? So that's why sometimes we'll walk up on somebody who's just sped through a red light, and if I walk up on that guy like he's just late for dinner, I might not come home tonight. If I walk up on him like he's just running from a robbery he just committed, well, I'm going to take a different kind of cautious approach, right? Because I'm thinking he might be somebody who's running from something bad, and I need to walk up and approach.

That's why those first few minutes of contact can be kind of awkward. It's not because we're thinking, hey, you're a speeder, you're a terrible person. No, it's because we have these two goals in mind, protect the community, but get home at the end of the shift.

Now once we realize he's just the guy who's late for dinner, things ought to shift, right? But what happens is the more you do this job, the more you stay on hyper-alert mode. And that, of course, can be misread by people.

I totally get that. But that is, I think, the biggest challenge we have as officers. Wow, interesting insights into what goes into thinking of a police officer. So next time you're pulled over, have a little respect. Do what the officer tells you. Keep your hands on the steering wheel.

Don't argue with him or her. And I was pulled over a while ago. I was over on the island of Maui, and they had the slowest speed limit.

I'm trying to justify it now. It was like the slowest speed limit. It was like literally 25 miles per hour, and you're on an open kind of road.

And I'm thinking it's got to be, you know, you can drive faster. And he pulls me over, and I just said, officer, I'm sorry. I didn't know I was breaking the speed limit. And I got my driver's license out, and I said, you know, I went over it. And I just owned it. I wasn't trying to get out of it.

I owned it. He goes, well, you were honest enough to see the truth. Have a nice day and slow down. Well, yeah, this is discretionary. The idea for us is can we change future behavior?

We don't want, you know, crazy behavior on the road. It did change my behavior. That's right. And he didn't have to write you a ticket to do it.

No, he didn't. That's the beauty of it. We appreciate that.

We appreciate those that serve us in law enforcement. So if you're listening out there, thank you for what you do. But here's a book for everybody, a book that is going to be really encouraging to younger people as well. What I love about this book, Jim, is you've illustrated it. You're a graphic designer, and almost every page has an illustration of some kind. So it really breaks it down in an understandable way. It's called Person of Interest, why Jesus still matters in a world that rejects the Bible. And you described it to me as a kids' book for an adult.

Elaborate on that. Yeah, the idea is I think we have become such visual learners and such visual consumers of media that all of us are trying to figure out ways that how do we, and in kids' books, I love them because they are about 50-50 text to illustration. So I've written a few kids' books now. So now I was thinking when I was writing this book, I'm just no longer satisfied, even as an adult, with not being able to see the case. If I can make this visual, if I tell you what, 82% of these scientists in the 15th century were Christians. Well, if I showed you every one of them in a collection, you're going to go, wow, that's really powerful.

I need to see it. So the numbers don't mean as much as actually seeing the faces of all the scientists. So we wanted to be able to provide something like a kid. And again, what we're doing is like you always say, sometimes the Bible's hard. There are places in the Bible that need someone to translate them for us.

I mean, to make them accessible to us. That's what you do so well. We're trying to do something similar here, difficult concepts.

How do we throw them in a way that people can catch them? Jim, in the book, you kind of examine two cases side by side. One is a real life cold case you investigated in the latter part of your career as a cold case detective.

The other is the case for the deity of Christ. And you do a great job of showing how the same investigative techniques can apply to each case and produce a verdict. Sort of give us one morsel from that process, if you can.

Sure. And part of this is that we are able to convince juries of something that's true, even though we don't have any evidence from a crime scene. This happens all the time. The reason why I work cold cases are cold for a reason, because they're lame.

Okay. They don't have the evidence that a case that would be easily solved would have. So when I pick these cases up, I often know I'm not going to have evidence from a crime scene. I'm going to find another way to convince people that this actually occurred. And so I'm always talking about what leads up to the crime and what follows the crime.

That is as important as what happened on the day of the crime. As a matter of fact, what leads up to and what follows will often demonstrate what happened on the day of the crime. Well, it turns out the history is the same way.

What leads up to history? There's a prophetic fuse, right, of all the Jewish prophecy leading up to Jesus. There is a cultural fuse of all of the world powers that were aligned and unaligned in the wars that occurred until finally the Roman Empire begins to take over and develop a scenario to lay the foundation for the arrival of Jesus. And there's even a huge history, an ancient history of deities in the ancient world that seem to bear some resemblance to one another. As a matter of fact, I have identified 15 ways that these ancient deities are similar to each other, yet they don't all possess all 15 attributes.

They possess, you know, six, seven, eight of these attributes. Well, then it comes along one who possesses all 15 attributes of the ancient deities, and his name is Jesus of Nazareth. Now, why would God align history and then arrive meeting those attributes of the other?

Because it turns out that if you can meet the expectations of the expectors, you get a great response. And so what God does is he arrives, as Paul says on Mars Hill, you are people, you worship a lot of gods. You even see a monument here to the unknown God. Let me tell you now what you have been worshiping, kind of an ignorance. Let me tell you now about that. It turns out Jesus embodies the expectations of all humans who worship deities prior to Jesus. Why would this be the case?

Because that fuse is burning up to the appearance of God incarnate. And then, of course, all of human history that follows Jesus from the arts, from music, you realize you can reconstruct the story of Jesus just from the painted and sculpted artwork through antiquity to the Middle Ages. If all you had, you had to destroy all of art in order to erase the story. As a matter of fact, the top artists in the history of art, any genre, any time period, Google the top three artists in that genre, and guess what? In their portfolio, you will find a painting, a sculpture, an etching, a drawing of Jesus of Nazareth.

There is no other historical figure in the history of historical figures who can claim they've been painted or sculpted by everyone. So it turns out that you have to do a lot of erasing in order to erase the impact that Jesus has had on. Now, how could this be? Well, it turns out if he's just a guy, it makes no sense. If he's God entering into his own creation, it makes all the sense in the world. So it turns out that fuse and fallout are actually really good evidence that Jesus is who he said he was.

Wow. Jim, your book is so full of facts, you know, hard, cold hard facts. But when people come to the Lord, they come by faith. So how does a factual case support a faith decision?

Well, that's what we do. In jury trials, we're constantly saying, hey, we're going to give you enough good evidence to make the proper inference about what happened, even though you are still going to have unanswered questions. If you're the kind of person who has, you can't make a decision on a jury with unanswered questions, we're not going to impanel you, we're going to leave you off the jury, because we know we're not going to be able to answer every question.

We'll be able to answer enough, though, that we're not going to answer enough, though, to leave you with a smaller step of trust that for your inference. What we do in Christianity is the same way. Jesus did the same thing. He said, you know, hey, if you don't believe in what I told you, at least believe on the evidence of these miracles, just as in the Gospel of John.

He provides evidence at every turn. He heals, then he heralds. Why is it in that order? Why do I need to do this first to demonstrate the authority I have with the words I'm about to say, I've already laid the foundation for them evidentially. When John the Baptist is starting to struggle, right, he sends his disciples to Jesus. Jesus could easily tell those disciples of John the Baptist, go back and tell John, he should know better.

He's my cousin, for crying out loud. He left in the womb when our parents met. You know, he baptized me, he saw the descending of the, really? John should know better. No, what he does is he reminds the disciples of John the Baptist of the miracles he has worked in front of them. Go back and tell John, go back and remind John, that's evidence. That's called indirect evidence, right? The evidence of miracles.

Jesus constantly does this, even though we know that that evidence, and I know this too, I don't expect to argue somebody into the kingdom. What I want to do is help people to kind of remove the barriers they've constructed for themselves, so that when they hear the gospel, it's available to them. And so I think the kind of work we do is just to kind of till the soil.

We are preparing the ground for, and I know that for me personally, you could have done this all day long, it would have been useless. But at some point, God first acted to change the nature of my heart so I would pay attention to the case at all. I didn't do that. I was prayed into that position by people who loved me enough to pray for me, and God's Spirit moved in me, and it was all God, top down. But at the same time, when we take time to make a case, we're kind of like basically preaching the gospel. I needed to hear the case that way. I needed to hear that evidential case before I would listen to the gospel. And so that's how I became a Christian. I became a Christian by examining the gospels as if they were eyewitness accounts to see if they were reliable. And that helped me to tear down the walls that I had constructed so that when I read what the New Testament said about Jim Wallace, about my need for a savior, I was able to actually respond. You know, your story reminds me a lot of Lee Strobel, who we both know, great guy, and also Chuck Colson. You know, Chuck was a very intelligent man, and he worked with the president, and he was sent to prison connected to Watergate. But he came to faith when he began to consider the claims of Christ. I remember reading in his book that he took out a yellow legal tablet, kind of started writing down things that were for and against this idea of Christianity, and ultimately ended up believing. And, you know, this is how some people think.

But I wanted to ask you this. You know, Jesus said, people don't come to the light because they don't want their evil deeds exposed. Sometimes people put up a smokescreen.

We don't even know if they believe that things are espousing, but they throw a lot of things that you may be hoping that you'll just go away. How do you know, Jim, when it's a smokescreen that one should try to answer each of their objections, or if it's just really a person that isn't going to respond to anything you say because they're choosing to not believe in Jesus because they don't want to change the way they live? Yeah, well, there's three reasons why anyone rejects the truth claim, right? One is rational.

They don't think there's enough evidential reason for this. The second one is emotional. They've had some experience with other Christians, with their parents, whatever, that they emotionally respond. And the third is volitional. They just don't want to ever bend their knee.

Well, it turns out that almost all— That's a great summation. Well, yeah, all of this, if you think about all of what you hear from people, it's going to sound like it's a rational objection. So the volitional objectioner, the objector, the emotional objector is going to say something that sounds like it's a rational objection, but it's actually probably emotional or volitional. I actually think that almost 80% of objections are volitional and some are emotional and a very small percentage are—because people haven't even investigated the case one way or the other. But they'll say, oh, there's no reason to believe in miracles. Is that really your objection or is there something else?

And so you can ask good questions. One of the questions a friend of mine, Frank Turik, and I always ask is, if we could demonstrate evidentially that Christianity is true, would you become a Christ follower? Well, I don't think it's true. No, no, I'm saying if—just a thought experiment—if we could somehow demonstrate this beyond any doubt, that this is true, would you become a Christ—you'd be surprised when people would say no. And if that's the case, you know it's not a head issue.

It's a heart issue, right? And so what we do on juries is I don't spend a lot of time—there are some people that prosecutors do not want on the jury, and there are people that defense attorneys do not want on the jury. I call these ones and fours. There are people who are too entrenched in their view. They're not going to change their mind.

They're not going to be fair. We're looking for twos and threes, people who are on one side or the other, but they are open-minded enough to listen to the evidence and make the right inference. So what we have to do, I think, as I'm talking to people, I have to figure out, are they a one and a four?

I mean, this is somebody who, right now, God has not moved them into position three. And so I can spend all this time, and they're just going to—they see me as a—you know, they're a hammer looking for a nail. And this is on—and by the way, social media exposes these kinds of people quickly.

You probably see this on Facebook. You've got family members you've tried to communicate Jesus to. And they will—basically, they're just a hammer, and you're the nail. And at some point, you have to realize, okay, I'm going to now—instead of spending a lot of time preaching at them, sharing evidence with them—I'm now going to be in pray and model mode. I'm going to be praying that God—this is my own parent.

My own dad is in this category. You pray for that person, and you model Christ for that person. And then at some point, I think God will flip that switch for that person.

Well, it worked for you. You said you were prayed in. Absolutely.

I don't even know who did it. But I know that this is how this works, right? And people will say, well, yeah, I knew you when you were an atheist, and I used to pray for you.

Okay, great. Well, maybe that's your prayers. But the point is, I don't know, you know, my wife and I, we did not become Christians for the first 18 years we were together.

So it was a lot of time there that I had to kind of wrestle through these behaviors. I mean, habits you develop as a non-believer, who you trust, you trust yourself as a non-believer. A lot of this you have to kind of— but for me, I knew that as an investigator, really in a world right now, for example, we just came out of a coronavirus here. And what happens in there is, hey, the science dictates everything. You've got to demonstrate this. Everyone, both sides will argue they can demonstrate this with facts, right?

Well, we're in a world that says, yeah, unless you can demonstrate something evidentially, why would I care about this? And I think that has an impact on us as believers as well. We ought to be able to show that this isn't just beautiful. It isn't just transformational. Of course it is. But it's true. And it's true in a way that's evidential.

It's not just what's working for me. It's what is actually demonstrably true. You know, I think what I love about the way you present this truth, Jim, is it's like it's knowledge on fire. It's like it's knowledge. This is filled with information that's going to help people.

But you're on fire. You're passionate about what you're doing. This is not just something in academic pursuit.

It is that. And you have so many footnotes to back up what you've said. So this is clearly a well-researched book. But yet at the same time, I love your passion because ultimately your goal is to just see people come to believe in Jesus Christ. Well, a lot of it's from listening to you, to be honest. So passion is contagious. And if you say, hey, you know, why is it my kids aren't as passionate as I'd like them to be or my friends are? Well, are we as passionate? Because what happens is passion begets passion. So it's from listening to your radio show that has helped me to be passionate as well.

Well, thank you very much. Passion is contagious. And I think you're going to get some of that passion when you get a copy of this book by J. Warner Wallace called Person of Interest. You can see that Jim knows what he's talking about here, and you're going to have it right in front of you. All the footnotes, all the facts, even the illustrations made a very understandable.

So you don't have to be a great academic to understand this. This is something for everyone. As Jim described it to me, it's a kid's book for adults.

You're going to love this. Pastor Greg, you've mentioned how some believers are reluctant to share their faith, but at the very same time, they'll freely offer recommendations. You know, they'll recommend a movie or a restaurant or an auto mechanic. So why not recommend that people consider the Christian faith?

Exactly. How would a resource like this book, Person of Interest, help in making that kind of recommendation? Well, let me tell you how it would have helped an 18-year-old Greg Laurie. I was a newly minted Christian. I heard the pastor say, go share the gospel. So I went out and I started telling people about Jesus.

In fact, I ran into one of my old friends that I grew up with, and I was telling him about the Lord and what Christ had done for me. And suddenly some guy steps into the conversation. I didn't invite him to step in, but he came and barraged me with about four to five questions. I don't even remember what they were, but all I remember is I didn't have the answers. I was humiliated. I was embarrassed.

My friend I was talking to didn't want to talk to me anymore. And I went home and I realized I've got to study and prepare myself to answer questions that non-believers ask. We need to be equipped. You know, the Bible says we should be able to give to every man an answer concerning the hope that is in us, but with meekness and fear.

This is key. It's the way you deliver information. Sometimes Christians take data, information, facts that are all true, and they deliver them with a sledgehammer.

Sometimes they say, put your gospel guns away. The objective is not to win the argument. It's to win the soul.

The objective is not to burn the bridge, but to build the bridge. And if you want to win some, be winsome. Be a nice person. Don't be a know-it-all. Maybe you know a lot more than that person, but don't be the know-it-all. And take an interest in the person you're listening to. You know, Jim, you mentioned that when you went to church, the preacher said, before you were a believer, Jesus is the smartest man that ever lived.

This is, of course, true. And so here he is with the woman at the well. How easily Jesus could have just cut her off and said, give me a break. No, he listened to her. He engaged with her. He went back and forth with her.

Same with Nicodemus. He took time for people. And I think it's very important to deliver this information with compassion.

And J. Warner Wallace is a former cold case detective. He knows what he's talking about, but yet he delivers this with great passion and clarity. So this is the book the 18-year-old Greg Laurie needed to equip him to share his faith with people he was talking to. And this is the book that you need. If you're 18 or if you're 80, you're going to learn, as you read through it, it is so well researched, footnotes galore at the end. But then what I love about it, because you think, oh, this is some textbook.

I don't want to get this. It's illustrated all the way through because Jim is an illustrator. He's a designer. So he's giving this to you in an understandable way so you effectively see it as well as read it. Jim, you were an atheist for many, many years. What if you had read this book somehow during that time?

Would it have changed your mind? That's a good question. And I wonder sometimes, do we really hold intellectual objections? Or are most of our objections deeper than that?

They're emotional or volitional. That was really behind my objection. But I will tell you this, and I often say it. I only met two kinds of Christians. I was in Southern California. To be honest, I didn't have any Christian friends growing up. No one ever invited us to church. No one ever invited me to church. My parents weren't Christians.

I just did not have a sense. I didn't know anybody. And then I met some Christians at work.

Now I'm working as a police officer and then a detective. And the two groups of people I met the most often were, number one, police officers, a couple at our agency who were Christians. And when I would ask them questions, they did not have good answers. And I thought, wow, these are people who have a high value for evidence. Yet when I asked them questions, they're really evidentially based. They're like, so really? So you would never build a case against this guy we just put in jail the way you just built that case for me for Christianity? I just thought, really?

This is a very unexamined worldview. Then the other group I met, who said they were Christians, were the people I was taking to jail, okay? And those folks were telling me, yeah, you know, I'll be honest with you.

They would tell me I just got saved like, you know, last year, we're driving them to jail. And I'm thinking to myself, really? So we have two kinds of groups here. We have people who are either unwilling to look or don't even know if this is supported by the evidence and people who don't behave as though it's supported by the evidence.

And I wanted no part of either one. I think it would have been discomforting to know that there is a way of living as a Christian that is very well informed, informed about history, informed about science, informed from an educational perspective. You don't have to turn off your brain to be a Christian. As a matter of fact, this is the I think the the Great Dane of all the dogs in the yard, okay, the dogs who are, you know, philosophies of the world in the history of philosophy.

I see this as the Great Dane, right? Now, we don't need to act like chihuahuas where we're constantly barking because we're the smallest dog in the yard. It turns out, the Christian worldview is very well informed and is supported by the evidence. You can be comfortable. You don't have to react aggressively. All you have to do, though, is know what the evidence is, and you'll have a sense of calm about defending the case for Christianity.

Great statement. You don't have to turn off your brain to become a Christian. You know, the Lord says, come let us reason together, says the Lord.

Reason. There's a place for that, a place for answering the objections that people have and giving them biblical evidence. But then, you know, Jim, there's the evidence of a person's own life, like that guy who was healed, and someone challenged him.

He says, Look, all I can tell you was once I was blind, but now I see. That's not everything, but it's something, isn't it? Every Christian has that story. Absolutely. I don't think that it's not it. I have a tendency to downplay testimony because I don't trust people.

As a cop, you don't trust people, what they say. It's just a mechanism you put in place. But the reality of it is it's not an either or. I think that I want to hear that your transformational story at the same time, I want to hear the evidence that leads you to believe that this is what changed you, that it wasn't your imagination. It wasn't you were ready for a change anyway, that actually it was God's Holy Spirit based in this true worldview. So I think what happens if you're used to sharing your transformational story with people and it seems to fall on deaf ears. Well, try sharing that testimony about your transformation along with the evidence for Christianity. And I'm telling you, you'll have a different experience. I think most of us, when people say, well, I was forever changed by this, why don't people who prefer ever changed by their Buddhist experience or by their Muslim experience or by Oprah Winfrey?

It doesn't mean this isn't even true. What I want to know is not so much how were you changed. I want to hear that, but I want to know why you are attributing it to this.

Why do you think this is what changed you? And that's where having the evidence in your pocket can be helpful. Well, you want this evidence in your pocket, you better have a big pocket because I've got a book to give you. It's called Person of Interest by G. Warner Wallace. But this is a resource that you will consult again and again, footnoted, researched, well-written, but at the same time illustrated and made understandable. So anyone, I think a young man or a young woman be able to understand this as well as someone who is older and more of a reader. This is something everyone's going to benefit from. It's a brand new book called Person of Interest, subtitled Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible, written by former cold case detective J. Warner Wallace. And we'll send you your copy for your gift of any size.

Yeah, that's right. It's your donation that helps these studies to continue each day. It's really an investment in changed lives.

It not only helps your own spiritual education, but it helps us reach out to others who need the gospel. So thank you so much for your donation today. Write a new beginning, Box 4000, Riverside, California, 92514. Or call 1-800-821-3300. That's a 24-7 phone number, 1-800-821-3300.

Or go online to harvest.org. And again, the title of the book is Person of Interest. Hey everybody, Greg Laurie here. You know, my uncle, Fred Jordan, had one of the first Christian TV programs out there. It was called Church in the Home.

I remember watching it as a little boy when I was living with my grandparents. Well, we have Church in the Home for you every weekend. It's called Harvest at Home, and you can find it at harvest.org. We have worship and a message from God's Word. So join us this weekend for Harvest at Home at harvest.org. One of the phrases of the Beatitudes is, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy are the persecuted? Well, Pastor Greg unravels that mystery next time as he returns to his series in the Sermon on the Mount. Hope you'll join us here on The New Beginning. Thanks for listening to A New Beginning with Greg Laurie, a podcast made possible by Harvest Partners, helping people everywhere know God. Sign up for daily devotions and learn how to become a Harvest Partner at harvest.org.